The Nerd Fails of the Imaginary StarTrek Script in BreakingBad

During last night's episode of Breaking Bad Badger dropped some science with his pitch for an unwritten Star Trek script. Photo: Ursula Coyote/AMC

Throughout the last five seasons of Breaking Bad, the dynamic duo of Brandon “Badger” Mayhew and Skinny Pete have served as much-needed comic relief. They’re the Jay and Silent Bob of Albuquerque–or maybe a less nefarious Rosencrantz and Guildenstern–so it only seems right that Badger would dream up a Star Trek episode pitch based on Pavel Chekov, the wry, funny mood-lifter of the USS Enterprise.

During last night’s midseason premiere, “Blood Money,” we saw Jesse sit stoically in his living room as Badger and Skinny Pete (“Bones” McCoy?) had a very stoned discussion about Star Trek (like you do). Following Pete’s speculation that the transporter on the Enterprise essentially killed and then created a “color Xerox” of everyone it beamed up or out, Badger launches into his greatest monologue of the series: a detailed description of his own (hilarious) screenplay about Star Trek: The Original Series pie-eating contest, albeit it one that gets a few Trek details wrong.

It essentially lays out a scenario in which Chekov is winning the Enterprise crew pie-eating contest by having Scotty beam the pies out of his stomach as he eats them, and ends with Scotty getting so distracted by the attractive Uhura that he ends up beaming more than just the pies out of Chekov. Sayeth Badger: “Chekov screams, he sprays blood out of his mouth – Scotty beamed his guts into space!”

The idea is actually something show creator Vince Gilligan has been talking about in his writers’ room for years. Peter Gould, a fellow Star Trek fan who wrote the episode, asked to borrow the fanfic for Badger’s bright idea. A lot of the conversation between Skinny Pete and Badger, however, came from conversations he had with fellow writer Gennifer Hutchison. “It would be the ultimate diet, really. Eat anything you want, and then Scotty beams it out of your stomach,” he told Vulture. “But like with great technology, there are terrible things that can go wrong.”

However, for all of its deep-seated geekiness, there is one part of Badger and Pete’s conversation that raised the eyebrows of numerous Trek fans: Pete’s insistence that tulaberries are from the Voyager universe–a show that he misidentified as taking place in the Gamma Quadrant, rather than the Delta Quadrant–rather than the Deep Space Nine, the Gamma Quadrant show where tulaberries were actually introduced. (Neither of which would make tulaberries a possibility in a script Badger would write for the original series of Star Trek, but we digress.)

WIRED asked Breaking Bad’s de facto fact-checkers Gordon Smith and Jenn Carroll how the reference got confused and while they didn’t want to tread (lightly or otherwise) on Gould’s process, the short answer seems to be: weed, and how much those two characters like to smoke it.

“Speaking only for me and Gordon, Voyager is funnier and more identifiable, so that probably played a factor,” Carroll said in an email. “Plus, the tulaberry thing wasn’t something that seemed like it needed fact-checking: it works as-is because of who’s saying it, a stoner on a drug-fueled Star Trek geek-out.”

Also, for anyone wondering, Badger mention of Chekov isn’t an allusion to “Chekhov’s gun,” a dramatic principle that could potentially apply to the gun we’ve seen in Walt’s trunk in flash fowards since the start of Season 5.

“We have a [writers’] room that was split roughly between drama nerds and sci-fi nerds, but this one was thoroughly in the sci-fi nerds’ hands,” Smith said. “So there wasn’t really a sense that the homonyms would play as a pun on the other, more drama-nerdy Chekhov.”

There you have it. Breaking Bad: written by—and for—nerds of every stripe since 2008.

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